Children in a Flowery Meadow

Children in a Flowery Meadow of 1902 depicts the pastoral innocence of childhood in an open summer landscape — a subject that stands at the most benign end of Munch's engagement with childhood experience, offering no symbolic charge or psychological threat, simply the fact of children free in a flowering natural space. His ability to engage with childhood's uncomplicated happiness alongside its vulnerability and psychological complexity demonstrates the full range of his interest in the subject as a zone of human experience rather than a fixed symbolic content. The flowery meadow connected his work to the pastoral tradition that had represented childhood in nature as a symbol of prelapsarian innocence since at least the eighteenth century, but his handling remained observational rather than conventionally idealistic — real children in a real Norwegian meadow rather than symbolic putti in an idealised landscape.

Munch renders the children in the meadow with the atmospheric freedom of his best outdoor subjects — the figures in the flower-dotted meadow depicted with the loose, expressive handling that gave his outdoor subjects their quality of natural presence. His palette in the flowery meadow subject is characteristically colorful and warm, the flowers' colors and the summer light creating a composition of unusual chromatic richness within his usually more restrained subject world.